MANSUCKERS.—The three kinds of cuttlefish best known in British seas are, first, the sepia, the creature whose backbone is the ‘cuttlefish’ of the apothecaries’ shops; second, the ‘loligo,’ or ‘calamary,’ that has a beautiful penlike bone, and, from the presence of a bag containing a black fluid, is sometimes called the ‘pen-and-ink’ fish; and third, the ‘octopus.’ The octopus as seen on our coasts, although even here called a ‘mansucker’ by the fishermen, is a mere Tom Thumb, a tiny dwarf, as compared to the Brobdignagian proportions he attains in the snug bays and long inland canals along the east side of Vancouver Island, as well as on the mainland. These places afford lurking-dens, strongholds, and natural sea-nurseries, where the octopus grows to an enormous size, fattens, and wages war, with insatiable voracity, on all and everything it can catch. Safe from heavy breakers, it lives as in an aquarium of smooth lake-like water, that, save in the ebbing and flowing of the tide, knows no change or disturbance. The ordinary resting-place of this hideous ‘sea-beast’ is under a large stone, or in the wide cleft of a rock, where an octopus can creep and squeeze itself with the flatness of a sand-dab, or the slipperiness of an eel. Its modes of locomotion are curious and varied: using the eight arms as paddles, and working them alternately, the central disc representing a boat, octopi row themselves along with an ease and celerity comparable to the many-oared caïque that glides over the tranquil waters of the Bosporus; they can ramble at will over the sandy roadways intersecting their submarine parks, and, converting arms into legs, march on like a huge spider. _Gymnasts_ of the highest order, they climb the slippery ledges, as flies walk up a window-pane; attaching the countless suckers that arm the terrible limbs to the face of the rocks, or to the wrack and seaweed, they go about, back downward, like marine sloths, or, clinging with one arm to the waving algæ, perform series of _trapèze_ movements that Leôtard might view with envy. The size, of course, varies. I have seen and _measured_ the arm five feet long, and as large at the base where it joins the central disc as my wrist; and were an octopus by any chance to wind its sucker-dotted cable-arms round a luckless bather, fatal would be the embrace, and horrible to imagine, being dragged down and drowned by this eight-armed monster; a worse death than being crushed by coiling serpents like ill-fated Laocoon.